Ghostchild@Seradon wrote: Hayatets will now no longer have to stop flapping their wings when casting spells.
Khabarakh@Seradon wrote: Unfortunately there's not much of a simple fix for this as it concerns casters. Melee abilities are all instant so it makes a little sense that your auto attack will still run even if you backstab a target mid-refresh. The animations shouldn't break the immersion of the other. Casters on the other hand have casting times on many of their abilities and I'm not sure I'd want to see an auto attack fire off a few times in the middle of a 3.0 second casting time animation. Additionally how would you implement an auto attack for casters? It would have to be energy based in order to be balanced with the END requirement of auto attack. Also auto attack for melee uses a 2/3 ph, 1/3 OH rule? What would be the logic process coded into the system if you had two wands equipped versus a staff? What if you had two foci equipped? All though I'd love to see an auto attack for casters, I just don't see how you break immersion and implement it correctly. If they go through with this, I'd make sure the developers commit themselves to balance passes in three phases: 1. Healing. Half of the healing classes don't have a per hit hp return or proc to the group, iirc. 2. Hate generation. Do warriors gain an advantage being they get WS and dual wield? DKs left out in the cold? Paladins superior due to per hit procs to group? 3. DPS. And that's seven builds over as many classes: Rangers (Ranged), Bloodmages, Shaman (Hyatet) and all four INT caster dps'ers. I'm all for this change as I do enjoy playing my melee dps classes but there's a lot to be concerned about with its implementation.
Kimja@Seradon wrote: Oh, I'm not at all saying they would need to implement auto-attack for casters. Just that, by having auto-attack trigger constantly regardless of ability use for melee, the resultant DPS increase would require a balance pass across the archetypes to ensure that melee were not overly-advantaged compared to casters as a result.
This is really not a road we should be going down right now in my opinion, not only does it change class balance but item balance as well. I think it might be worth a look in the future when more pressing things are taken care of.
Torveld wrote: I tend to agree with Torv on this, I would rather see a lot of other things fixed first than worry about messing up class balance that is already borderline broken for some.
Playing a level 33 bard i use several haste components in my fight song to get my attack speed under the global timer. So what will this change mean to me overall? While not envying anyone that auto attack at any time, i expect light fighters as bard and rogues getting the least out of it due to there special attacks. Btw bards and rogues are not classes capable of soloing a lot of mobs or even 4 and 5 dots (near their level) most time, so that could result in more unbalancing. Just my two cents.
Paraglax wrote: Weapons were balanced based on their DPS numbers(damage/delay) and the faster weapons have smaller damage numbers on them. Rogues are limited to the faster daggers and suffer from the smaller numbers from damage. This change will finally give Rogues a DPS boost. Most of the time a player is only able to get one auto-attack in before they use the next ability, yeilding lower DPS for the Faster weapons. This change is very welcome for the Rogues and will make the faster weapons a little better for everyone. Most players will still go for the big damage numbers for the special attacks.
Khabarakh@Seradon wrote: I'm not either as I think it breaks a bit of what the classes do which is try to micromanage cast times and ability effects. Only wrote out as much as I did in case the developers were looking at this as an option so they wouldn't need "balance passes" after this change was implemented.
Can we get any more info on where this is developement-wise. Also wondering about the thoughts on the Endurance regen delay removal idea.
